under obama, it has been negative. if obama is a socialist he is terrible at it. here is the interesting thing, if the economy is shrinking because the economy is shrink, we now added new jobs, almost 200,000 jobs in december. and we added more than 150,000 jobs in january. what is amazing about this, this period was fiscal cliff element, it was what everybody was saying the economy really needed was deficit reduction. and this is a period in which we didn't come to a big deficit reduction deal. what we did is raise taxes. it cut the deficit a bit, but not a big deal. what happened to the markets? somehow we kept adding jobs and the stock market did really well. it all worked out reasonably okay. so here is what we learned. cutting government spending hurts economic growth. no doubt about it. that means doing it in a bad economy may not be such a good idea. but increasing taxes a bit, not coming to the big deficit deal. the private sector and even the markets don't seem all that concerned. the last week should cause a lot of people in washington to re-think what t